2025/01/31 by David Fitzgerald · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography #Migration and Labor Dynamics #Migration, Refugees, and Integration
paper · doi:10.1093/sf/soaf014
openalex publication_date 2025/01/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Framing Refugees is a discursive institutionalist account of how governments and political parties in Turkey, Germany, Poland, Uganda, Chile, and Singapore publicly justified policies around the admission of refugees in the 2010s. The authors argue these policies reflect interpretation of two questions—who we are as a nation and who they are as refugees—expressed through six different frames: economic developmentalism, degree of cultural proximity, security, moral obligations, legal obligations, and position vis-à-vis states of refugee origin and international institutions. The qualitative analysis of parliamentary debates and political party platforms on the admission of refugees brackets discussions around integration. The documentary sources are complemented with interviews with politicians and experts. The main strength of the book is its geographic scope. The study analyzes six countries from 2009 to 2021, with minor temporal variation by country, depending on when a refugee group was politically salient. A first cluster of case studies discusses policy toward Syrians in Turkey, Germany, and Poland, with Ukrainians as a foil for Syrians in Poland. The next three case studies treat discussions of different refugee groups in different countries: Venezuelans in Chile, South Sudanese in Uganda, and Rohingya in Singapore. While this research design is inelegant, it shows the limits to the generalizability of arguments that are familiar in particular cases. It is rare for comparative studies to use the same analytic framework and methodology in countries in the Global North and South. The logic of theoretical sampling yields cases with extreme variation on the dependent variable, with cases of refugee admission that range from some of the highest in the world (Turkey, Germany, and Uganda) to lowest (Singapore).